CadenceCivet

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A 29 year old civet furry who works on sewage infrastructure (Yes, I’m a wrench-turner) and occasionally dabbles in fictional worldbuilding. Profile pic by Yutmutt on Furaffinity.net


Institutions that have a core of hyper-committed individuals doing work, (without much relief from additional contributors) who become gradually burned out until eventually the institution either folds, or catches on fire and drives into a ditch

See: Forums with volunteer staff, Conventions with volunteer staff, pretty much anything with individuals who have other things they’re doing on top of trying to live their daily lives plus work/school/education or simply because the one thing they’re volunteering for takes up so much of their own time that they can’t meet needs such as sleep, socialization outside of a business/pseudo-professional context, or even laying down and staring up at the ceiling to decompress.

I swear I need to come up with a better name for this and I don’t want to be so vain as to name it after myself ;;

Mostly this sort of thing has been my observations with/participation in things like volunteer social media moderation and convention staffing until the event needed AAA to haul its fireblasted remains out of a culvert


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in reply to @CadenceCivet's post:

in corporate speak this is "hero culture" - this whitepaper was just from googling the term but it's honestly not a bad discussion of the topic https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hub/313462/file-532438459-pdf/Transforming-a-Hero-Culture-Inteq-Whitepaper.pdf?t=1396970778000

the tl;dr is that depending on and celebrating "heroes" makes sense for an organization that is just starting up. you have to be scrappy! but it's not sustainable long-term, and should be treated as a liability as your organization matures

i think it's related! companies love the idea of the "10x developer" which i suspect is typically an autistic person who doesn't have great work/life balance. as a 1x developer who has worked with 10x developers, there are some problems!

  • eventually the 10x developer gets bored or burns out
  • when they do, no one else really understands what they wrote
  • because the emphasis was on churning out large amount of feature, the code may be idiosyncratic to the one developer who wrote most of it

this is by no means saying the 10x was a bad developer, just that the culture supporting a single high-volume point of failure is maybe less effective long term than a more collaborative process

also related is another corporate speak concept of "bus factor" - how many people could the organization survive if they were hit by a bus? if the answer is that something fails because one person is out of commission, your process is very fragile and you're probably also quietly ruining someone's life

you may be surprised to learn how long a company can exploit it's workers! i only learned the term when i and many of my best colleagues were quitting in rapid succession at a previous job. i worked there for seven years and when i quit i was replaced by two people

turns out you can get a long way in establishing being a hero and making sacrifices as normal by exclusively hiring young workers who don't know any better and being in a 'cool' industry

Ah, I’ve never been at a startup with primarily young staff, so yeah.

The startups I’ve been involved with all required deep domain expertise, which takes a decade or two to acquire.

this wasn't in tech, and hadn't been a startup for a few years. hero culture can make sense very briefly for a startup and is (probably, guessing) likely to develop in them, but as a problem it's in no way limited to startups